Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

I tend to look at a woman surreptitiously. If she appears in front of me suddenly, I’m unable to see anything of her. Since this girl had materialized so unexpectedly, I couldn’t get a good enough look at her to form an opinion of her appearance, although I did see her feet; they were squeezed into a pair of new-style sandals.

The path from the lab to the studio was topped with gravel that had numerous pretty round stones sticking out. This made walking in her open sandals rather difficult for her, as they kept slipping on the round stones again and again.

After this encounter Miss Neelam and I gradually became friends. The studio personnel didn’t know it, but our relations were quite informal. Her real name was Radha. Once I asked her why she had changed her beautiful name and she replied, ‘Oh, no particular reason,’ then added a minute later, ‘it’s too beautiful to be used in films.’

You might think that Radha was a religious kind of woman. Not at all. She couldn’t care less about religion and its trappings. But just as I inscribe ‘786’, the numerical value of ‘bismillah’, on top of the first sheet of paper before writing a new story, she also just happened to love the name Radha dearly. Since it was her wish that we not call her Radha, henceforth I will only call her Neelam.

Neelam was the offspring of a Benares prostitute. And it was with a Banarasi accent and cadence that she spoke. It sounded very sweet to the ear. She always called me Sadiq, though my name is Saadat. ‘Neelam,’ I once said to her, ‘you can just as easily call me Saadat. I know you can. So why don’t you? For the life of me, I can’t understand it.’

A faint smile appeared on her dark, thin lips. ‘Once I’ve made a mistake, I stick to it.’

I think very few people were aware that the person everyone in the studio considered just an ordinary actress happened to possess a unique personality. She didn’t have the shallowness, the baseness of other run-of-the-mill actresses. Her gravitas, which everyone at work saw through his own lens and misinterpreted, was her loveliest attribute, entirely endearing.

This gravitas, this charming sturdiness served as the most becoming make-up on the clear, smooth surface of her darkish complexion, though it cannot be denied that it had packed the corners of her thin lips with the unnamed bitterness of sorrow — a quality, let’s accept it, that set her apart from other women.

I have never ceased to wonder, then or now, why they picked her for the role of the vamp in Ban ki Sundri . She wasn’t even nominally foxy or sharp. When she appeared on the set wearing a skimpy choli to play her part for the first time, I was terribly shocked. She could immediately guess people’s reactions, so the minute she saw my expression she explained, ‘Director Sahib ordered me to appear in this outfit because I’m not playing the part of a respectable woman. You know what I told him, “If this is an outfit, I’m willing to walk with you naked.”’

‘So what did Director Sahib say?’

Again a faint smile appeared on her thin lips. ‘He immediately started imagining me naked. . How silly can these people get! What need was there to tax his poor imagination once he had seen me in this wispy outfit.’

This should suffice by way of Neelam’s introduction for an intelligent reader. Let me now proceed with the events which I must record to finish this story.

In Bombay the monsoon starts in June and continues till the middle of September. The first couple of months the rain comes down so hard that it’s impossible to work in the studio. The shooting of Ban ki Sundri had started towards the end of April. We were just about finishing the third set when the first rains broke on us. Only one small scene that had no dialogues remained, so we kept shooting. Once that ended, we were at a loose end for months.

This provided many opportunities for people to spend time together. I spent nearly the whole time sitting in Gulab’s restaurant, sipping cup after cup of tea. Whoever walked in was dripping wet, or almost. All the flies outside had swarmed in. The atmosphere became unbearably filthy. A cleaning rag lying on one chair, an onion-chopping knife on another. Gulab Sahib standing nearby, churning out his Bombay Urdu with his disease-rotted teeth: ‘ Tum udhar jaane ko nahin sakta ’ (You can’t go there), ‘ Ham udhar se ja ke aata ’ (I’ll go there and come back), ‘ Bohat lafra hoga. . han. . bara vanda ho ja’ienga ’ (It will create a big mess. . yes. . it will result in a big loss).

Everyone came to this restaurant, with its corrugated tin roof, everyone except Seth Hurmuzji Framji, his brother-in-law Edalji, and all the heroines. Niaz Muhammad was obliged to come here twice because of his pets Chunni and Munni. Raj Kishore showed up once a day. The minute he crossed the threshold with his tall, athletic body, everyone’s eyes suddenly lit up, but not mine. The young male extras immediately got up to offer Raj Bhai their seats. Once he sat down, everyone crowded around him like so many moths. After that, you heard only two types of things: the extras praising Raj Bhai’s marvellous acting in old films, or Raj Bhai regurgitating the ancient history of how he dropped out of school and, later, out of college to join the film world. Since I had memorized all of this by now, I would greet him when he entered and get out of the place.

One day, after the rains had stopped, Niaz Muhammad’s cats scared the daylights out of Hurmuzji Framji’s German shepherd, who ran to Gulab’s tea joint with his tail tucked between his legs. As he was running in, I saw Neelam and Raj Kishore talking on the round platform under the maulsiri tree. Raj Kishore was standing and, as usual, nodding his head, which meant that as far as he was concerned he was making interesting conversation. I don’t remember now when or how he’d been introduced to Neelam, but she’d known him well even before she joined films. And if I remember correctly, she had casually praised his good-looking, well-proportioned body once or twice.

I came out of Gulab’s restaurant and had just made it to the eves of the recording studio when I saw Raj Kishore take down his khadi bag from his broad shoulder with a jerk and pull out a fat notebook. I immediately knew that it was his diary.

After finishing the day’s work and receiving his stepmother’s blessings, he was in the habit of writing in his diary before he went to bed. Even though he loved Punjabi dearly, he wrote the diary in an English that was vaguely reminiscent of the delicate style of Tagore in some places, and Gandhi’s political manner in others. It also reflected a significant influence of Shakespearean drama. But I never did see any sincerity in anything he wrote. Should you ever come across this diary, you’ll know all there is to know about ten, maybe fifteen years of his life. How much money he donated, how many poor he fed, the meetings he participated in, which outfits he wore and which he discarded. . and if my guess is right, you’ll also spot my name on some page beside the figure 35, the amount I once borrowed from him and haven’t returned to this day since I figured he’d never note that it had been returned.

Anyway, he was reading some pages of his diary out loud for Neelam’s benefit. Even though I was quite some distance from them, I surmised from the way his lips moved that he was praising the Lord in the style of Shakespeare.

Neelam sat quietly on the round cement platform under the maulsiri. From her elegantly serious face, it was apparent that Raj Kishore’s words were making no impression on her. She was looking, rather, at his protruding chest. His shirt was open and his dark black hair looked ravishing on his fair chest.